Osteria Francescana scoops world’s best restaurant crown
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Italy’s Osteria Francescana was crowned the world’s best restaurant for the second time on Tuesday at an awards ceremony put on by British trade magazine “Restaurant,” beating out top eateries in Spain and France.
Run by chef Massimo Bottura, the restaurant in Modena pipped last year’s winner, New York’s Eleven Madison Park, in the World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards, after first taking the honor in 2016. It is the only Italian establishment to have won the annual accolade.
“This is amazing. This is something we built all together,” Bottura said at the awards ceremony in Bilbao in Spain’s northern Basque Country. “I am going to use this spotlight to show that chefs in 2018 are much more than the sum of their recipes.”
The list’s organizers praised “Bottura’s contemporary cuisine, which challenges and reinvents Italian culinary tradition while making use of the finest produce from the Emilia-Romagna region.”
Bottura’s father wanted him to become a lawyer. But when he was 23 years old, Bottura dropped his law studies to open a trattoria in Campazzo in the countryside around Modena in the Po Valley. On his days off, he would study with French chef Georges Cogny, who had a restaurant two hours away.
“He said to me: ‘Always follow your palate, because you have a great palate which will make Modena known around the world,’” Bottura said in 2016.
He opened Osteria Francescana in 1995 after spending time in New York and Monaco.
Spain’s El Celler de Can Roca, which took the top honor in 2013 and 2015, came in second while third place went to Mirazur in southern France.
Magazine “Restaurant,” owned by William Reed Media, launched the awards in 2002 and they are now as coveted by restaurants as Michelin stars, although the methodology used to select the best restaurants has faced criticism, especially from several French chefs who say it remains unclear.
There are no criteria for putting a restaurant on the list, which is based on an anonymous poll of more than 1,000 chefs, restaurant owners, food critics and other industry insiders from around the world.
Each member gets 10 votes and at least four of those votes have to go to restaurants outside their region. The top 10 included two Peruvian eateries — Central, which slipped to number six from fifth last year, and Maido, which climbed one place to number seven.
The only Asian restaurant in the top 10 was Bangkok’s Gaggan. Spain had three restaurants in the top 10, including El Celler de Can Roca, while France had two including Mirazur. The 2018 list of 50 best restaurants included eateries in 22 countries — but over half were in Europe. Six are in the United States, six in Latin America and six in Asia.
Britain’s Clare Smyth, who catered the dinner at the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle last month, was named best female chef and France’s Cedric Grolet best pastry chef, at the ceremony.
Peru’s celebrity chef Gaston Acurio was given a lifetime achievement award.
The top restaurant award has gone to Spain seven times, the most of any country. In addition to El Celler de Can Roca’s two wins, ground-breaking Spanish chef Ferran Adria’s El Bulli, which he closed in 2011, took the prize a record five times.
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